House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Rep. Jason Smith, R-Mo., new to the position, announced the committee's new Republican members:
An auto parts manufacturer in Piedras Negras, Mexico, which was previously subject to a rapid response complaint, is the target of a second complaint, this time by the union that won an election there in August, La Liga.
Members of the House of Representatives voted 365-65 on the second day of the session to create a Select Committee on China. The committee, which will be led by Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., will be bipartisan.
For the first time in 100 years, the House of Representatives was unable to choose a speaker on the first vote. Because 19 Republicans this week voted for someone other than Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., no candidate got a majority of the votes. The same result happened on the second vote.
Rep. Steve Scalise, the House Majority Leader-elect, told his colleagues in a Dec. 30 letter that he plans to bring 11 pieces of legislation for a vote during the first two weeks of the 118th Congress, including a bill that would establish a Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party.
Rep. Ron Kind, D-Wis., one of the leading voices for free trade in the Democratic caucus, and Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., a free-trade purist in the Republican caucus, issued a joint paper of recommendations on trade on Dec. 29, just before they were both leaving office.
Just ahead of a change in control at the House Ways and Means Committee, the International Trade Commission issued a comprehensive report on how trade preference programs such as HOPE and HELP and the Caribbean Basin Trade Partnership Act have affected the Haitian economy. The ITC report, which ran 200 pages without appendixes, noted that Haiti's exports to the U.S. are more than 80% of all of Haiti's exports.
The Senate on Dec. 21 confirmed Alexis Taylor to be USDA’s undersecretary for trade and foreign agricultural affairs. Taylor touted the importance of the Indo-Pacific region during her September nomination hearing (see 2209230028).
On the last day of the current Congress, retiring Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, introduced a bill that would ask the Commerce Department and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to analyze the economic integration between the U.S. and China in priority sectors, and the U.S. government's views of how that integration should change over the next five to 19 years.
Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, who chose to retire from the Senate, warned that Section 232 tariffs -- and the economic costs they impose on downstream users of steel -- are "about to get much worse," because there was no interest in passing reforms to the statute.